Sat Jul 23, 2011 at 20:42:52 PM EDT

Ever since Jared Loughner's murderous attack in Tucson, Americans have been more sensitive to the way extreme political discourse can effect the deranged, paranoid and alienated, and how perverse inflammatory metaphors (gunsights, 2nd amendment solutions, watering the tree of liberty) can actually provide the ideas that feed political violence.

Now these alarms have reaped their bitter harvest. With 92 people dead, the vast majority 16-19 year olds at a Labour summer camp, there is no doubt of the political aspect of Anders Brehing Breivik's crime.

It was revealed that the 32-year-old former member of the country's conservative Progress party - who had become ever more extreme in his hatred of Muslims, leftwingers and the country's political establishment - had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser in May to be used in the bombing. While police continued to interrogate Breivik, who was charged with the mass killings, evidence of his increasingly far-right world-view emerged from an article he had posted on several Scandinavian websites, including Nordisk, a site frequented by neo-Nazis, far-right radicals and Islamophobes since 2009.

The Norwegian daily VG quoted one of Breivik's friends, saying that he had become a rightwing extremist in his late 20s and was now a strong opponent of multiculturalism, expressing strong nationalistic views in online debates.

Breivik had talked admiringly online about conversations he had had with unnamed English Defence League members and the organisation Stop the Islamification of Europe (SIOE) over the success of provocative street actions leading to violence.

"I have on some occasions had discussions with SIOE and EDL and recommended them to use certain strategies," he wrote two years ago. "The tactics of the EDL are now to 'lure' an overreaction from the Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists, something they have succeeded in doing several times already."

1. The rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism in Western Europe
2. Why the Islamic colonization and Islamisation of Western Europe began
3. The current state of the Western European Resistance Movements (anti-Marxist/anti-Jihad movements)
4. Solutions for Western Europe and how we, the resistance, should move forward in the coming decades
5. + Covering all, highly relevant topics including solutions and strategies for all of the 8different political fronts

I have heard these ideas so many times, I'm beginning to forget how frightening they are.

Before he killed over 90 innocent people, Breivik quoted J.S. Mill:

"One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

Well, Breivik's belief system is quite clear. A right wing, militarised, totalitarian ideology which puts all the ills of the world down to one cause.

In this case it isn't communism, or capitalism, or ZOG, it's Islam.

In the last ten years I've seen a spectre return to haunt Europe, the spectre of racism, hidden under the guise of Islamophobia. The phobia existed long before the attacks of 9/11 or the growth of Salafist extremism. It was present in the Bosnian war, mainly among Serb Nationalists. It caused the Kosovan War. It underlined much Neocon thinking, especially when Sam Huntingdon's theories of civilisational conflict provided a new global enemy once communism had waned. It also informed the war in Iraq...

In the US, especially around the phenomenally misnamed 'Ground Zero Mosque' Islamophobia is much in evidence. But in Europe, perhaps because of the proximity of the Mashriq and Maghreb, perhaps because Europe always sees immigration as a negative thing unlike the US, Islamophobia has taken root. It unites old fashioned racists, anti-clerics, intellectuals and neo-cons alike.

For the last few years, I have been appalled to see the casual racist statements made about Muslims (and their liberal enablers) in real life, in the media, and even more online where, in the UK, I find myself constantly combating statements about Islam which, if the word 'Jew' 'Christian' or 'Buddhist' replaced 'Muslim' would be apparent in their abhorrent hatred.

The spectre of racism is haunting Europe again in a way it hasn't since a hundred years ago, when anti-semitism was rife. But this time, it's mainly directed towards Muslims, and any philosophy of tolerance or secularism. The Utøya Massacre and the Oslo bombing is just the ultimate expression of this hate.

Words matter. Ideas motivate. And now we know where the apocalyptic language of the right can lead, even in tolerant Norway

To argue that our overreaction to Islamic terrorism has inspired and emboldened the extremist Right. It may be worth noting that the complaint of our bomb-makers and assassins of a century ago was that the transition to modernity was tardy whereas that of our modern fundamentalists and xenophobes is that it has been made in mistaken haste. In the former case they attacked on behalf of a utopia that never emerged and in the latter for a myth that never existed. Our mental health professionals could probably find a scheduled, clinical diagnosis for both.

I'm guessing Anders is looking forward to a public trial in which he plays the heroic role of Hitler at the People's Court in Munich. And I fear that we may be further humbled and horrified by the process.

Just at the moment, I would set Fox News' course twenty degrees to port and get out from under the shadow of extremism. I mean, just imagine if Anders cited Beck or Limbaugh in his testimony, for example?

But do you really think the US media will delve into any of the issues you raise? Any more than they have with all the homegrown rightwing nutjobs who've erupted over the last few years? Do you expect any deep soul-searching from the media that pretty much ignored the story of the guy, for example, who shot up a church full of people because he thought they were too damned liberal? Nope, this will all be swept under the "lone nutcase" rug, as usual, after a few days of handwringing over how horrible it all is.

I would love to be proven wrong, but I ain't holding my breath.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done subjunctively.

I said "if I were Rupert" and it gave me a shudder. I reckon the same indifference with which millions of Americans watched the distant Gulf War unfold on TV affects the Right even more so; nothing seems real beyond our borders and even then there are boundaries.

But that's what I mean; sooner or later one of these nut cases will have a Tea Party tattoo or something and then there will be trouble.

3.22 Using terror as a method for waking up the masses - many of our people will hate us for it

"We do not want to do this, but we are left no choice."

There are situations in which cruelty is necessary, and refusing to apply necessary cruelty is a betrayal of the people whom you wish to protect.
The preferred method is to attack in a violent and deceptive form (shock attack), usually with limited forces (1-2 individuals).

Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike. Explain what you have done (in an announcement distributed prior to operation) and make certain that everyone understands that we, the free peoples of Europe, are going to strike again and again. Do not apologise, make excuses or express regret for you are acting in self-defence or in a preemptive manner. In many ways, morality has lost its meaning in our struggle. The question of good and evil is reduced to one simple choice. For every free patriotic European, only one choice remains: Survive or perish. Some innocent will die in our operations as they are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Get used the idea. The needs of the many will always surpass the needs of the few.

Quite staggering really. And frighteningly articulate. I wonder how his trial will go. Part of his Breivik's terror objective was to get more oxygen for his cause - and he's succeeded on that part of his mission.

We will launch information campaigns and create awareness by using any means necessary, including distribution of our messages by using lethal shock attacks against concentrations of class A and B traitors in a pan-European context. The primary goal of the shock attacks is not the immediate physical manifestation of the attack (destroying a few buildings, killing a few hundred traitors) but rather the indirect effects. Shock attacks will have the potency to penetrate the strict censorship regime of the cultural Marxists/multiculturalists

As I mentioned with my "People's Court" concerns up-thread. The poisoned chalice is now handed to the Norwegian justice system. The galling thing is that this pipsqueak knew he could could precipitate this; in the Thirties the fascists made no secret of their tactic of using the tolerance of liberal democracy as a weapon against it. And it often was effective.

Not saying it starts a movement but if the whole horrifying episode normalises extremist activism one iota we have lost the round.

has always been a specialty on the extreme right and statist left. NAZIs and Soviets could always offer "humane" arguments to depict their atrocities as ultimately preserving peace and goodness. The discourse around what to do with "Indian problem" in 19th century US governmental debates also exuberantly patted European Americans on their own backs for being righteously modern and human. More recently, Benny Morris has argued that in 1948 the emergent Israeli government engaged in ethnic cleansing, but that the problem is that Ben Gurion didn't go far enough. Had he doubled down, there would be peace and tranquility today. Extreme violence in the present is always supported by a paranoid view of the past and a utopian fantasy of a placid and often homogeneous future.

...the nasty rhetoric of Islamiphobia has blossomed into these ffruits of evil. 92 dead. As many injured. Many more traumatised. Most of them children.

The rhetoric of muslim hatred is so prevalent here that I feel in physical - or at least mental - danger merely for pointing this out. And even the liberal organs of our media jumped to the conclusion this was a jihadist attack. Neither The Sun nor the WSJ surprise me these days - but the New York Times!

Islamiphobia goes well beyond the far right. And as Shain upthread suggests, it's just found its Bin Laden/Baruch Goldstein/Munich putsch

to protest high rents in major population centers. The fact that their tax dollars have been devoted to subsidizing home for settlers on the West Bank, which involves removal and restriction of housing for Palestinians, is not at the center of the protests. I'm not surprised that it took the self-interest of Israeli Jews to spark a confrontation with Bibi's government. Fine. "I can't find an affordable apartment" always trumps "my government kicking people out of their homes." But now that it's happening, the need for solidarity for a supposedly internal domestic issue means they aren't touching the question of the occupation, which is central to this whole problem.

Strums utopian fantasy?

Jews and Palestinians recognize that the occupation is the very mechanism making affordable decent housing unavailable for the youth of both national communities and form a coalition around this as a domestic and civil rights issue.

Not much chance though.

In the mean time, Islamophobia accelerates. Fuck Jennifer Rubin, who feels completely comfortable to respond to psychopathological Islamophobic violence to promote Islamophobia.

And still, the center is afraid to appear leftist, and thus the association between the left, violence, and hatred of freedom continues, even though terror is clearly a tool of the extreme Christian, Islamic, and Jewish right in today's world.

It all makes me want to secede from the whole freaking planet. Can't we set up a Moose colony on a moon of Venus or something? I'll bet our kids would get along beautifully, despits the significant age difference.

But good people still abound. The bad guys haven't won yet. I'm in Slovenia now, en route to Sarajevo, and the bad guys killed hundreds of thousands there - but Mladic and Karadzic are now in the Hague, and Milosevic dead.

Maybe (like Murdoch) the evil has to get bad enough for us all to see it and reject.

I'm not worried for our kids: they'll make their own paradise. But in the meantime, got to stop the world from getting worse.

I always try to write something up so it's programmed from hand to eye to brain, and then drop the paper when I'm actually giving a talk. People seem to prefer it when a speech is structured but not actually 'read'.

On Thursday I'm doing a webinar on cybersecurity for water treatment systems and just putting the slides together today. After a short agenda to set the tone:

History of Water Management
- From Round Stones to Hoover Dam
Current Risks and Threats
- State of the Cyberphysical Union
Safety and Reliability in Water Cybersecurity
- Managing Control and Visibility
Operational Alternatives
- Build, Buy or Outsource
Q&A

I have one slide that I stay on for the whole History section, laying out one image at a time clockwise (top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left...) I walk from our protohuman ancestors to Nashville TN in 1979. 12 images give me the visual cues to talk about a particular topic to construct the complete case.

Slideware can be used as a substitute for talking, but done well it provides a framework with a set meter.

As good a place as any to post right here under Gandalf. :~)
(2.00 / 8)

Sorry for my outburst the other day.

I should of gone the email route.

Stand behind my words just think it should not have gone down how it did.

Guess I still need to do some growing up. Heh.

It is what it is.

My nerves are a bit frayed and I'm jumpy as fuck. Have decided to come back to D.R. to do what I think I should be doing. I'm working in "el campo" (rural area) where peeps have no running water and live in houses with dirt floors. I come back to civilization during the weekends and will be immersing myself in some guerilla art political peaceful protest thing (think bansky but more political and less awesome. heh. ) when I'm in the city.

I'm trying to squeeze in as much "walk the walk" rather than "blog the blog" stuff and now is the time to do it. I will always be an ideologue I think (or at least until I have kids and stuff) and I have enough saved up to pay my student loan while I work for next to nothing here (doing what I do in a small hospital here).

I'm seeing things I wish I didn't have to see. Getting used to this will take time and even with my previous experience this has been hard. Been here almost 2 weeks now. Seeing what poor really is makes the contrast with peeps on big blogs complaining about how bad shit is so huge. Fucking emo progressives are lame and whiny ass turds. Fuck em. I'll be staying away from blogs because they make less and less sense the more I work here. Not looking to get banned from anywhere and I know the stress will take its toll. Better to avoid meaningless conflict.

Americans have it great even in the middle of all the current bullshit. We should never take for granted anything and it seems to me that many people do. Pretentious fucks can kiss my ass! lol!

The Moose is a safe haven from the madness (as is J-Town over at GOS).

Love each other and work hard at the little things.

If you have food in your tummy and a bed to sleep in consider yourself blessed.

Smile. A lot.

I will be gone for an extended period. Don't know how long.

Those who have my email can hit me up. Those who don't can ask around.

Wish me luck my moosey family and I hope to make ya'll proud.

Un abrazo grande!

Los quiero mucho.

- Alejandro

Just because they are posting on a progressive site doesn't make them progressives. - John Allen

...this was about as far from an act of meaningless violence as you can get. It is an explicitly articulated, carefully argued conclusion from a mishmash of every current far right platitude out there. Breivik does not merely claim influence by someone like Robert Spencer, he quotes him and so many others at great length as part of his manifesto! It's a pastiche of vast tracts of the far right blogosphere. None of this delegitimizes sane, vital critiques of Islamist intolerance, violence and ideology; none of it makes these cited ideologues and fanatics guilty of murder or in any way being accomplices to murder, or in any way connected to his crime. But it does seem to me to prove beyond any doubt that Christianism is indeed a phenomenon in its own right, and that its evolution into neo-fascist violence, like Islamism's embrace of neo-fascist violence, is now something that cannot be denied.

The whole thing is well stated and sound. I think we are in for a defining course correction as a culture, or at least politically; with every delay we will continue to reap unforeseen consequences. It is hard not to see the American Islamphobes or the European xenophobes Breivik cited as being conceptual enablers of this tragedy. The actions of that pitiful, smug, unrepentant little bastard are just the logical extension into criminality of their theoretic ranting and established and widely published enemies lists. The clearly violent and absolutist rhetoric could have been predicted to grant permission to some fanatic sooner or later, and now it has.

about the use of Islamophobia to whip up violence against the left. This jackweed was so scared of Islam...that he murdered a bunch of white kids whose parents are center-left activists. I don't want to sound hysterical, but it's no longer unimaginable, or for that matter paranoid to anticipate, some nut who in terrified about how democrats want to institute sharia law shooting up a democratic event or campaign headquarters. Given our penchant for taxing real hard-working Americans to death and handing the revenues over to radical Imams...

...having a great time at the film festival, but struggling with this odd keyboard.

The results of the last rounds of Islamophobia here are still everywhere to be seen: the pock marks of snipers and the claw mark splashes of mortars, even 16 years on. Not to mention the haunted lost look in the eyes of men my age.

I think Sully was right, and I'm just hoping the one good side effect of this atrocity is that the Islamophobe rhetoric I see everywhere on British blogs, be discredited - its premises debunked for the CT they always were, and the underlying demonisation exposed.

Mind you I'll expect whines from the promulgators of this hate; they always complain that I'm trying to 'censor' them because I merely point out how bankrupt their arguments are. Bring it on I say: share your hate, bring it into the sunlight. Even you might see where these ideas lead, and distance yourself before it's too late.

The leader of a British far-right group to which Anders Behring Breivik claims links called the attacks a sign of "growing anger" in Europe against Muslim immigrants, while a politician in a party in Italy's governing coalition called some of the gunman's ideas "great."

Following a wave of near universal revulsion against the attacks, the comments were among the first public statements that appeared to defend the extremist views that drove the Norwegian gunman to carry out the massacre.

Stephen Lennon, leader of the English Defense League, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he does not condone Breivik's rampage but "the fact that so many people are scared - people have to listen to that."

"People should look at what happened in Oslo and understand that there is growing anger in Europe," said Lennon, 28. "You suppress people's rights you suppress people's voices and people will just continue to go underground - but that doesn't make the problem go away."

Skeptics regarding the viability of democracy have focused on four primary vulnerabilities: the problem of the tyranny of majority (Kant worried a great deal about this and the terror in France sort of confirmed it), the question of whether it could produce a strong enough central authority to withstand a popular effort to dissolve it (civil war put that one to bed for a little while), corruption leading to plutocratic oligarchy (see that one all around us...AND in Thucydides), and whether it can withstand extremist violence.

I think it's good that democracies are put to the test. It means that they will fail here and there. I just wish those failures didn't come with such heart-rending body counts.

But this doesn't mean that conservatives need to surrender their convictions. The horror in Norway no more discredits Merkel's views on Muslim assimilation than Ted Kaczynski's bombs discredited Al Gore's views on the dark side of industrialization. On the big picture, Europe's cultural conservatives are right: Mass immigration really has left the Continent more divided than enriched, Islam and liberal democracy have not yet proven natural bedfellows and the dream of a postnational, postpatriotic European Union governed by a benevolent ruling elite looks more like a folly every day.

For decades, Europe's governing classes insisted that only racists worried about immigration, only bigots doubted the success of multiculturalism and only fascists cared about national identity. Now that a true far-right radical has perpetrated a terrible atrocity, it will be easy to return to those comforting illusions.

But extremists only grow stronger when a political system pretends that problems don't exist. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have an obligation to acknowledge that Anders Behring Breivik is a distinctively right-wing kind of monster. But they also have an obligation to the realities that this monster's terrible atrocity threatens to obscure.

I participate in a GreTscH guitar blog quite frequently. Recently a member of the forum from Sweden initiated an off topic thread about VW bugs. I wrote in that I think they look cool, but on a personal level, I couldn't shed the historical associations. I received this message from a Quebecois member in response:

I'm not old enough (born in '47) to have been part of that conflict, so what i know was written mostly by jews and a lot (too many of them) of movies also done by jews.

hitler did order the killing of people, well so did the US president at the time .

The Holocaust: Teach the Controversy!

Let's give each side its due.

Wonder what he thinks about Breivik.

In the mean time, Glen Beck compared the kids at that camp to Hitler Youth. You have to be simi-conscious to be outraged at anything that spills out of Beck's mouth at this point. But the fact that a large group of people in the US still consider him a moral and historical authority confuses me all to hell.

An out-of-work truck driver accused of opening fire at a Unitarian church, killing two people, left behind a note suggesting that he targeted the congregation out of hatred for its liberal policies, including its acceptance of gays, authorities said Monday.

A four-page letter found in Jim D. Adkisson's small SUV indicated he intentionally targeted the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church because, the police chief said, "he hated the liberal movement" and was upset with "liberals in general as well as gays."

Adkisson, a 58-year-old truck driver on the verge of losing his food stamps, had 76 rounds with him when he entered the church and pulled a shotgun from a guitar case during a children's performance of the musical "Annie."

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done subjunctively.